And lo On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:54:42 +0200, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> did  
spake thusly:

> scott wrote:
>>> I know the BT Vision system is supposed to allow you to download video  
>>> content to watch later, but I'm not aware of any system which can  
>>> manage it in realtime. (Certainly not just using a normal PC...)
>>  Many TV company websites let you watch TV live via your PC at varying  
>> levels of quality.  I have certainly seen a few that exceed digital SD  
>> broadcast TV.
>
> Seriously??
>
>> How about BBC iPlayer, what's the quality like on that? (I can't access  
>> it outside the UK)
>
> Pitiful. Utterly pitiful.
>
> I mean, forgetting the minor detail that it's plain unusuable at certain  
> times of day, the picture quality is abysmal. (The sound isn't bad  
> though.)

I use it via a wireless link on my PS3 and I agree that at certain times  
it's quite choppy. Quality is worse than normal broadcast, but it's hardly  
abysmal. For those outside the UK it's comparable to the 4OD channel at  
youtube http://www.youtube.com/user/channel4 where the maximum seems to be  
480p

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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> abysmal. For those outside the UK it's comparable to the 4OD channel at 
> youtube http://www.youtube.com/user/channel4 where the maximum seems to be 
> 480p

That seems comparable to normal digital SDTV.

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"Phil Cook v2" <phi### [at] nospamrocainfreeservecouk> a écrit dans le message 
de news: op.vbtop7c1mn4jds@phils...
>
> Ethernet speakers?
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EtherSound
But not a cheap solution

Marc

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> scott wrote:
> > Anyway, there are also compression algorithms that are a lot more 
> > efficient than the one used on DVDs. So in theory you could get DVD 
> > quality with a lot less than 9 MBit/s if you use a better compression 
> > algorithm.

> Indeed. A 10:1 improvement in compression is easily attainable without 
> noticable loss compared to DVD compression anyway.

  10 times smaller than MPEG-2 with the same visual quality? Now that,
I think, would be quite hard.

  Maybe if the MPEG-2 had been created with a crappy software (thus
requiring plenty of bitrate) and then you used really aggressive H.264
encoding settings (something like requiring 24 hours of encoding time
for each hour of video or such), perhaps. But under normal circumstances
10:1 feels a bit excessive.

  Could you take a 1.5-hour 4GB DVD-quality MPEG-2 and make a 400MB H.264
from it with the same resolution and without visible loss of quality?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 4/27/2010 3:02 AM, Invisible wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>> Invisible wrote:
>>> When do you think that day will be?
>>
>> Not only is it here. It's a commodity.
>>
>> http://www.netflix.com/NetflixReadyDevices
>
> I don't follow.

Whats not to follow? They stream movies directly from the internet 
(albeit at SD resolutions ..)

-- 
~Mike

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>>>> When do you think that day will be?
>>>
>>> Not only is it here. It's a commodity.
>>>
>>> http://www.netflix.com/NetflixReadyDevices
>>
>> I don't follow.
> 
> Whats not to follow? They stream movies directly from the internet 
> (albeit at SD resolutions ..)

Presumably this only actually works if you have a suitably fast Internet 
connection though?

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>>>> When do you think that day will be?
>>>
>>> Not only is it here. It's a commodity.
>>>
>>> http://www.netflix.com/NetflixReadyDevices
>>
>> I don't follow.
> 
> Whats not to follow? They stream movies directly from the internet 
> (albeit at SD resolutions ..)

Of course there is the SlingBox too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingbox

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scott wrote:

> Of course there is the SlingBox too:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingbox

Again, that's all very nice. But unless you have insane levels of 
bandwidth available, it's not going to work.

There's nothing theoretically difficult about sending video data over 
the Internet. The problem is the bandwidth.

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On Tue, 27 Apr 2010 17:18:21 +0200, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>
> There's nothing theoretically difficult about sending video data over  
> the Internet. The problem is the bandwidth.

You seem to be missing the fact that a lot of people have had the  
necessary bandwidth for years.



-- 
FE

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>> There's nothing theoretically difficult about sending video data over 
>> the Internet. The problem is the bandwidth.
> 
> You seem to be missing the fact that a lot of people have had the 
> necessary bandwidth for years.

Hmm, interesting. Where I live, most people have between 2 Mbit/sec and 
8 Mbit/sec. (I gather that until ADSL2 is deployed, you can't exceed 8 
Mbit/sec...)

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Phil Cook v2 wrote:
> Ethernet speakers?

Does a Media Center Extender count? ;-)

Seriously, I don't have ethernet *everywhere*. I couldn't do surround-sound 
speakers over ethernet. Wireless maybe, but not ethernet.

I told them to put an ethernet wire from the closet to each phone jack. I 
should have said from the closet to each cable TV box as well.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> scott wrote:
>>> Anyway, there are also compression algorithms that are a lot more 
>>> efficient than the one used on DVDs. So in theory you could get DVD 
>>> quality with a lot less than 9 MBit/s if you use a better compression 
>>> algorithm.
> 
>> Indeed. A 10:1 improvement in compression is easily attainable without 
>> noticable loss compared to DVD compression anyway.
> 
>   10 times smaller than MPEG-2 with the same visual quality? Now that,
> I think, would be quite hard.

Hmm. Rethinking, 6:1 or so. Basically, you can fit a DVD onto a CD without 
really comprimising the signal.  And remember that when they make DVDs, they 
don't necessarily squeeze it as small as possible. They squeeze it as much 
as necessary to make it fit on the disk, even if they could compress it more.

I misthought. It's more like 6:1. I was confusing Blu->DVD instead of 
DVD->CD or something.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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Invisible wrote:
>>>>> When do you think that day will be?
>>>>
>>>> Not only is it here. It's a commodity.
>>>>
>>>> http://www.netflix.com/NetflixReadyDevices
>>>
>>> I don't follow.
>>
>> Whats not to follow? They stream movies directly from the internet 
>> (albeit at SD resolutions ..)
> 
> Presumably this only actually works if you have a suitably fast Internet 
> connection though?

No, it works great over dial-up too. You should try it.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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Bill Pragnell escreveu:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>>> Because, say, games at full HD may have to cut geometry or frame rate
>>> here and there to fit comfortably?
>> What do TV resolutions have to do with computers? You connect a computer
>> to a monitor, not a TV.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_console

LOL

seems like Andrew still got some 30 years ahead to fully get to grips 
with the real world...

-- 
a game sig: http://tinyurl.com/d3rxz9

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Invisible escreveu:
>>> (And hell, half the equipment and content that says "HD" on it isn't 
>>> even full resolution anyway... Why allow half a dozen resolutions 
>>> when it would have been far simpler for the designers and less 
>>> misleading for the public if they allow only one resolution?)
>>
>> Because, say, games at full HD may have to cut geometry or frame rate 
>> here and there to fit comfortably?
> 
> What do TV resolutions have to do with computers? You connect a computer 
> to a monitor, not a TV.

besides game consoles, many people for the past few years have been 
connecting computers to their large screen FullHD TVs.  Because, you 
know, it's usually more pleasing seeing images at a large screen from 
the comfort of your sofa (yeah, with a wireless keyboard) rather than 
sitting a few inches away from a much smaller screen.

-- 
a game sig: http://tinyurl.com/d3rxz9

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Darren New escreveu:
> Invisible wrote:
>>>>>> When do you think that day will be?
>>>>>
>>>>> Not only is it here. It's a commodity.
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.netflix.com/NetflixReadyDevices
>>>>
>>>> I don't follow.
>>>
>>> Whats not to follow? They stream movies directly from the internet 
>>> (albeit at SD resolutions ..)
>>
>> Presumably this only actually works if you have a suitably fast 
>> Internet connection though?
> 
> No, it works great over dial-up too. You should try it.

BTW, don't you guys find it funny that ADSL is "dial-up" too?  Twas not 
long ago that I used to dial-up at 56Kbps and looked forward to having a 
"cable modem" connection, but today I "dial-up" over the phone line and 
have 10Mbps connections... ^-^

technology advances at a far too ridiculous pace to try to categorize 
with silly terminology... :P

-- 
a game sig: http://tinyurl.com/d3rxz9

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> a écrit dans le message de news: 
4bd705be$1@news.povray.org...
> Hmm, interesting. Where I live, most people have between 2 Mbit/sec and 8 
> Mbit/sec. (I gather that until ADSL2 is deployed, you can't exceed 8 
> Mbit/sec...)

http://www.bb4mk.org/ (assuming you live there)

G.

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nemesis wrote:
> BTW, don't you guys find it funny that ADSL is "dial-up" too? 

Not really. It's built into the line card, so you're not actually dialing 
anything. You're just using the same wires you would be dialing on.

Indeed, the two hardest parts of making ADSL work is dealing with rings and 
dealing with dialing.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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Darren New escreveu:
> nemesis wrote:
>> BTW, don't you guys find it funny that ADSL is "dial-up" too? 
> 
> Not really. It's built into the line card, so you're not actually 
> dialing anything. You're just using the same wires you would be dialing on.

really?  I used to connect without a line filter in my other telephone 
across the room and, thus, if you happened to pick up the nearby phone 
while it was connecting, you would listen to a bit of that "folkloric" 
well-known old-modem dialing-up tune.

-- 
a game sig: http://tinyurl.com/d3rxz9

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Invisible escreveu:
> scott wrote:
>>> I've yet to see anything on YouTube which even approaches TV quality.
>>
>> You did find a video that supports HD resolutions, and switch YouTube 
>> to use that resolution, and watch full-screen?  Search "1080p demo" to 
>> easily find some.
> 
> The ones with an HD option look bettER, but still not particularly good. 
> At least, the ones I've seen.

http://vimeo.com/9078364

youtube sucks...

-- 
a game sig: http://tinyurl.com/d3rxz9

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nemesis wrote:
> really? 

Really. I worked across the hall from the guys inventing it.

The signals from ADSL are about 1% the strength of the signals from voice. 
There's no connection there other than you to the line card. That's why you 
can still talk on the phone when you have ADSL.

(Now, without appropriate filters, maybe nowadays you can hear the ADSL. And 
it's doing things vaguely modem-like. But only over the wire. By the time it 
gets to the switch, it's on a separate path already.)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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Invisible wrote:

> Hell, when I was at uni ten years ago we had computers exceeding these 
> resolutions. With Windows NT 4.0, Service Pack 4. Has technology not 
> moved on since then? It's not like there's any technical challenge to 
> using a higher resolution, after all...

Government regulators, for whom being safe is generally more important 
than being right, had a major role in the determination of the standard. 
  The standard had to allow for broadcast within a strictly-defined 
frequency band, and this limit was chosen based on technology that is 
now ready for deployment to your local museum, because these decisions 
were made years ago.

If I am remembering things correctly, there was even some insistence 
that the signal be displayable by sets designed for the old broadcast 
standard.  If that sounds thinking-impaired, well, that's the FCC for you.

Regards,
John

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On 27-4-2010 14:07, Phil Cook v2 wrote:
> And lo On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 22:01:41 +0200, andrel <byt### [at] gmailcom> 
> did spake thusly:
> 
>> On 26-4-2010 14:49, Warp wrote:
>>> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>>>>>> Question: Why aren't there any widescreen cinemas yet?
>>>>> At risk of entirely misunderstanding the question, all cinemas have 
>>>>> shown all
>>>>> films in 16:9 or wider for almost a hundred years.
>>>
>>>> Really?
>>>
>>>> Huh, well, you learn something every day. The picture always looked 
>>>> fairly square to me...
>>>    I'm beginning to suspect that this is not Andrew, and instead some 
>>> troll
>>> is posting using his nickname.
>>>    If even TV is not square (it's 4:3), how in the world could you ever
>>> think that movies are square? I don't get it.
>>>    The narrowest aspect ratio used in movies for the past 20+ years has
>>> usually been 1.85:1. The most common aspect ratios for big movies today
>>> is 2.25:1 and even 2.35:1 (that's well over twice as wide as tall).
>>>
>> a few days ago I heard a talk that might provide an explanation. 
>> Someone set up an experiment with 180 degrees view and figured out how 
>> wide they perceived it. You get a camel distribution with one hump at 
>> 180 and another, larger! one at 90. Experiment was reproducable per 
>> person.
>>
>> Hard to believe but apparently true. Something fishy in our brain. Jan 
>> Koenderink, who was giving the talk, is trying to figure out why.
> 
> Perhaps something similar to line perception where we overestimate acute 
> angles and underestimate obtuse ones.
> 
Is that also wildly variable between people? (I wouldn't know, because I 
am only one person)

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On 04/27/10 07:57, Mike Raiford wrote:
> Whats not to follow? They stream movies directly from the internet
> (albeit at SD resolutions ..)

	Depends on how you define SD - I've seen movies through it that are
definitely beyond DVD quality.

-- 
I considered atheism but there weren't enough holidays.

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> Hmm, interesting. Where I live, most people have between 2 Mbit/sec and 8 
> Mbit/sec.

Which is plenty.

Check out the freeview bitrates:

http://dtt.me.uk/

If the average bitrate of a BBC channel is 3.2 Mbit/s (higher than most 
other channels) using MPEG2, then I'm pretty sure watching the same signal 
compressed with MPEG4 at 2 Mbit/s is going to look virtually identical.

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>> Hard to believe but apparently true. Something fishy in our brain. Jan 
>> Koenderink, who was giving the talk, is trying to figure out why.
> 
> Perhaps something similar to line perception where we overestimate acute 
> angles and underestimate obtuse ones.

My mother believes she can sing. Even though she's actually about a 
fifth to a third flat. The result sounds truly *horrible*! You'd think 
she could hear the difference, but no...

She also claims to be unable to tell the difference between major and 
minor chords, which is impressive given the vast, world-alering 
difference between the two.

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And lo On Tue, 27 Apr 2010 23:29:15 +0200, andrel <byt### [at] gmailcom>  
did spake thusly:

> On 27-4-2010 14:07, Phil Cook v2 wrote:
>> And lo On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 22:01:41 +0200, andrel  
>> <byt### [at] gmailcom> did spake thusly:
>>> Hard to believe but apparently true. Something fishy in our brain. Jan  
>>> Koenderink, who was giving the talk, is trying to figure out why.
>>  Perhaps something similar to line perception where we overestimate  
>> acute angles and underestimate obtuse ones.
>>
> Is that also wildly variable between people? (I wouldn't know, because I  
> am only one person)

Supposedly 'in-built' but it would be interesting to run those perception  
tests on the same group of people if only to dismiss it as a factor.

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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On 4/27/2010 11:15 AM, Darren New wrote:

>
> Seriously, I don't have ethernet *everywhere*. I couldn't do
> surround-sound speakers over ethernet. Wireless maybe, but not ethernet.
>
> I told them to put an ethernet wire from the closet to each phone jack.
> I should have said from the closet to each cable TV box as well.
>

How times change. I remember back when I had my house built (Shame I'm 
not in that house anymore, but its all for the better) I requested a 
phone jack near the entertainment center (I did have the living room 
wired for 5.1 surround.

Now with internet-ready consoles and blue-ray players it makes perfect 
sense to have ethernet wired to the entertainment center as well. I 
wanted to wire the house for ethernet, but the builder didn't supply it, 
and wouldn't allow it. But that was no big deal. I think the next house 
I wind up in will likely be an existing home rather than a new build 
since most of the new homes are now too far out of the way for us, so it 
could be interesting to wire some extended services into an existing home.

-- 
~Mike

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Mike Raiford wrote:

> I wanted to wire the house for ethernet, but the builder didn't supply it, 
> and wouldn't allow it.

My dad wired it himself. ;-)

(As in, he literally chiselled out chunks of wall and then plastered it 
over again.)

And then we replaced the Ethernet router with a wireless one. Um... OK.

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On 4/27/2010 12:59 PM, nemesis wrote:
> Darren New escreveu:
>> nemesis wrote:
>>> BTW, don't you guys find it funny that ADSL is "dial-up" too?
>>
>> Not really. It's built into the line card, so you're not actually
>> dialing anything. You're just using the same wires you would be
>> dialing on.
>
> really? I used to connect without a line filter in my other telephone
> across the room and, thus, if you happened to pick up the nearby phone
> while it was connecting, you would listen to a bit of that "folkloric"
> well-known old-modem dialing-up tune.
>

probably hearing some artifacts from the out-of-band signaling the ADSL 
modem is doing. Which is why you need the filter ;) I remember back when 
I had ADSL forgetting a filter on a phone jack, and picking up that 
phone. It was more like I had a bad connection than anything, though.

-- 
~Mike

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On 4/27/2010 10:18 AM, Invisible wrote:
> scott wrote:
>
>> Of course there is the SlingBox too:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingbox
>
> Again, that's all very nice. But unless you have insane levels of
> bandwidth available, it's not going to work.
>
> There's nothing theoretically difficult about sending video data over
> the Internet. The problem is the bandwidth.


Meh, I had a 1Mbit DSL connection for a long time, and my wife could be 
watching Youtube videos of kids playing with cats, and I could watch a 
netflix film at very decent quality w/o interruption for buffering. Of 
course now, with my cable internet bandwidth is no longer an issue... ;)

-- 
~Mike

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On 4/27/2010 8:15 PM, Neeum Zawan wrote:
> On 04/27/10 07:57, Mike Raiford wrote:
>> Whats not to follow? They stream movies directly from the internet
>> (albeit at SD resolutions ..)
>
> 	Depends on how you define SD - I've seen movies through it that are
> definitely beyond DVD quality.
>

I think the resolution actually tops out somewhere around 720x480. Their 
STB only supports the SD mode, though it may be progressive scan, or it 
could be that you have a high enough bandwidth connection that you're 
getting less compression.

What I have seen does indeed rival DVD in terms of picture quality, though.

-- 
~Mike

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On 4/27/2010 11:23 AM, nemesis wrote:

>
> LOL
>
> seems like Andrew still got some 30 years ahead to fully get to grips
> with the real world...
>

Why doesn't my Atari 2600 do HD?

-- 
~Mike

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On 4/27/2010 4:12 PM, John VanSickle wrote:

> Government regulators, for whom being safe is generally more important
> than being right, had a major role in the determination of the standard.
> The standard had to allow for broadcast within a strictly-defined
> frequency band, and this limit was chosen based on technology that is
> now ready for deployment to your local museum, because these decisions
> were made years ago.
>
> If I am remembering things correctly, there was even some insistence
> that the signal be displayable by sets designed for the old broadcast
> standard. If that sounds thinking-impaired, well, that's the FCC for you.

kind of like how NTSC color was kludged on top of the existing black and 
white broadcast signal in the name of backwards compatibility?

-- 
~Mike

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>> Again, that's all very nice. But unless you have insane levels of
>> bandwidth available, it's not going to work.
>>
>> There's nothing theoretically difficult about sending video data over
>> the Internet. The problem is the bandwidth.
> 
> 
> Meh, I had a 1Mbit DSL connection for a long time, and my wife could be 
> watching Youtube videos of kids playing with cats, and I could watch a 
> netflix film at very decent quality w/o interruption for buffering. Of 
> course now, with my cable internet bandwidth is no longer an issue... ;)

It is utterly baffling to me that this is possible. In my experience, 
YouTube on its own is very unreliable. At certain times of day it's just 
unusuable, while at other times it's just about stable. (I guess this is 
probably due more to server load than end-user bandwidth though.)

Even when it works properly, the quality is nowhere near TV quality. 
Same for BBC iPlayer, 4 on demand and all those others. As soon as you 
make it go fullscreen, it looks horrifyingly blurry and covered in 
compression artifacts. You certainly wouldn't bother paying money to 
watch a *movie* at such low quality...

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> My dad wired it himself. ;-)
>
> (As in, he literally chiselled out chunks of wall and then plastered it 
> over again.)

Before they came up with cavity wall insulation you could just drop your 
cables down between the inner and outer brickwork, drill a hole through the 
wall where you want the socket, use the old bent-tape-measure trick to grab 
the cable and wire it up to a socket.  Job done.

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> Even when it works properly, the quality is nowhere near TV quality. Same 
> for BBC iPlayer, 4 on demand and all those others. As soon as you make it 
> go fullscreen, it looks horrifyingly blurry and covered in compression 
> artifacts.

Are you comparing the two signals the same way?  Note that if you feed 
normal SDTV into a 22" monitor and sit 30 cm away then it looks *really* bad 
too.

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scott wrote:
>> Even when it works properly, the quality is nowhere near TV quality. 
>> Same for BBC iPlayer, 4 on demand and all those others. As soon as you 
>> make it go fullscreen, it looks horrifyingly blurry and covered in 
>> compression artifacts.
> 
> Are you comparing the two signals the same way?  Note that if you feed 
> normal SDTV into a 22" monitor and sit 30 cm away then it looks *really* 
> bad too.

Well, DVDs are SD aren't they? I quite often watch DVDs on my PC...

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> Well, DVDs are SD aren't they? I quite often watch DVDs on my PC...

DVDs use about 5x the bitrate of SDTV.

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And lo On Wed, 28 Apr 2010 10:08:55 +0200, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> did  
spake thusly:

>>> Hard to believe but apparently true. Something fishy in our brain. Jan  
>>> Koenderink, who was giving the talk, is trying to figure out why.
>>  Perhaps something similar to line perception where we overestimate  
>> acute angles and underestimate obtuse ones.
>
> My mother believes she can sing. Even though she's actually about a  
> fifth to a third flat. The result sounds truly *horrible*! You'd think  
> she could hear the difference, but no...
>
> She also claims to be unable to tell the difference between major and  
> minor chords, which is impressive given the vast, world-alering  
> difference between the two.

My father will happily sing and tap along half-a-beat out to music that he  
likes. Drives me mad.

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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And lo On Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:53:51 +0200, scott <sco### [at] scottcom> did  
spake thusly:

>> My dad wired it himself. ;-)
>>
>> (As in, he literally chiselled out chunks of wall and then plastered it  
>> over again.)
>
> Before they came up with cavity wall insulation you could just drop your  
> cables down between the inner and outer brickwork, drill a hole through  
> the wall where you want the socket, use the old bent-tape-measure trick  
> to grab the cable and wire it up to a socket.  Job done.

Pah bent-tape-measure, professionals use ferrets :-)

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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Mike Raiford wrote:
> On 4/27/2010 4:12 PM, John VanSickle wrote:
> 
>> Government regulators, for whom being safe is generally more important
>> than being right, had a major role in the determination of the standard.
>> The standard had to allow for broadcast within a strictly-defined
>> frequency band, and this limit was chosen based on technology that is
>> now ready for deployment to your local museum, because these decisions
>> were made years ago.
>>
>> If I am remembering things correctly, there was even some insistence
>> that the signal be displayable by sets designed for the old broadcast
>> standard. If that sounds thinking-impaired, well, that's the FCC for you.
> 
> kind of like how NTSC color was kludged on top of the existing black and
> white broadcast signal in the name of backwards compatibility?

Isn't "NTSC color" like "ATM machine"?

Oh wait, "Never Twice Same Color" is not the official acronym meaning? :)

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Phil Cook v2 <phi### [at] nospamrocainfreeservecouk> wrote:
> My father will happily sing and tap along half-a-beat out to music that he  
> likes. Drives me mad.

  Accenting the off-beat is a completely valid form of rythm. Ever heard
eg. reggae music?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> Phil Cook v2 <phi### [at] nospamrocainfreeservecouk> wrote:
>> My father will happily sing and tap along half-a-beat out to music that he  
>> likes. Drives me mad.
> 
>   Accenting the off-beat is a completely valid form of rythm.

Sure. If you are consistently accenting the same beat.

Tapping midway between beats with variable accuracy is NOT valid. ;-)

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And lo On Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:59:40 +0200, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> did  
spake thusly:

> Phil Cook v2 <phi### [at] nospamrocainfreeservecouk> wrote:
>> My father will happily sing and tap along half-a-beat out to music that  
>> he
>> likes. Drives me mad.
>
>   Accenting the off-beat is a completely valid form of rythm. Ever heard
> eg. reggae music?

Not the way he does it, he thinks he's perfectly in time with the music.

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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Invisible wrote:
> You'd think she could hear the difference, but no...

I figured out that's why my wife can't sing. There was an experiment at a 
science museum where it would play a tone and you try to match it. But you 
couldn't here two tones at the same time. I usually got within one Hz of the 
same tone. She was regularly off by 5 or 10 Hz.  I'd play the two 
alternating, and she's say she couldn't hear the difference.

It doesn't stop enthusiastic bad singing, tho.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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Invisible wrote:
> And then we replaced the Ethernet router with a wireless one. Um... OK.

Unfortunately, I only had two wires strung down to the first floor. 
Fortunately, I could drill from the closet into the phone jack in the 
kitchen from behind, so I could put stuff in the closet, including a 
wireless AP and a hub to run the wire under the carpet to the entertainment 
center.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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>> You'd think she could hear the difference, but no...
> 
> I figured out that's why my wife can't sing. There was an experiment at 
> a science museum where it would play a tone and you try to match it. But 
> you couldn't here two tones at the same time. I usually got within one 
> Hz of the same tone. She was regularly off by 5 or 10 Hz.  I'd play the 
> two alternating, and she's say she couldn't hear the difference.
> 
> It doesn't stop enthusiastic bad singing, tho.

You know that pitch perception is logarithmic, right?

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Invisible wrote:
> probably due more to server load than end-user bandwidth though.)

Probably not.  Probably due to bottlenecks between you and the backbone.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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Invisible wrote:
> You know that pitch perception is logarithmic, right?

She was still off by 10x as much as I was.  Things that sounded the same 
were a good semitone or even full tone different.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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